Deca SportsReview

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Certainly not a ten like the name suggests.

By Craig Harris

Nintendo's already made a bazillion dollars on its Wii system, with the pack-in Wii Sports making up a large portion of why people are scarfing up a system in record numbers. So it's only natural that other game companies try to capitalize on the success of Wii Sports by producing Wii discs that feature the same theme and style of gameplay. But with Deca Sports Hudson clearly missed the reasons why Wii Sports is so accessible to anyone who picks up the Wii Remote: the Nintendo games are fun and easy to understand. Hudson's creations for Deca Sports are all over the spectrum – while you may find a couple of decent sports in this ten-game pack, the majority are terrible and not worth you or your multiplayer friends' time.

Deca Sports, as the title suggests, is a compilation pack of ten sports games that, like Wii Sports, are created to take advantage of the unique properties of the Wii Remote and Nunchuk. These ten games can be played as-is against computer or human opponents, or they can also be played with a single player high-score competition in what's called the Deca Challenge. The game's produced with an attempt at the same simplistic and cartoony presentation that Wii Sports has, but perhaps the designers should've been looking at more than the game's presentation to see why Wii Sports is at least a worthwhile game design.

Honestly, Deca Sports could've simply been called "Curling and Archery with Eight Other Mediocre Games." The only two gems here are two games you wouldn't think could actually be cool. Curling is, surprisingly a whole lot of fun and well-produced on the Wii: though the rules take a bit of time and trial-and-error to understand (which the game doesn't do a very good job of teaching..more on that in a second) the actual Curling model represents the "shuffleboard-on-ice" design really well. Good weight, nice control – this could essentially be Deca Sports' version of Wii Sports Bowling, and it's easily one of the best representations of Curling seen yet. Archery, while certainly done better in games like Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games, is simplistic fun that requires a steady hand on the Wii pointer to nail those far-away targets.

The rest of the games in the bunch are either bland and boring or just downright terrible. Easily the worst games in the bunch are the ones using Deca Sports' racing-like engine. Go Karts, Motocross, and Snowboarding are the absolute pits. They look bad, control bad, and offer a severe sense of frustration that a casual game like this shouldn't even have. The designers don't even have the forethought of telling you that these games are played by holding the Wii remote in a different way than the usual "gripped" motion. Badminton and Volleyball attempt to mimic the simplistic nature of the sports in similar fashion that Wii Sports Tennis does, but the wonky swing controls lack responsiveness and makes it difficult to master shot placement in the same way. Plus the weak isometric view makes it feel more like you're an interactive observer than you are out on the court. And the two games that require the nunchuk peripheral – soccer and basketball – are two sports games that are slow, sluggish and entirely too awkward to be more than a distraction that lasts more than a couple of minutes. And the less said for the snooze-inducing rhythm-based Figure Skating, the better.

And for a title that's aiming at the Wii Sports casual crowd, the designers don't really offer much in the way of in-game tutorial. The game's structure is incredibly confusing, with a starting menu that doesn't tell players where they should go first. And the confusion continues after you select your sport, as you'll have to select a team with no explanation on each member's strengths and weaknesses…only that they're of small, medium, and large build. But how does that all come into play in archery over soccer? Instead of taking a cue from Wii Sports to wean players into each sports' different control schemes and rules, the designers of Deca Sports simply leave the tutorials as awful, unintuitive text instructions within an optional menu. Half the time playing Deca Sports I felt that the only reason I knew how to play each game was because Hudson representatives had shown me how during in-office demos and the Tokyo Game Show. Good luck getting the same attention on the consumer level.

The Verdict

Two games out of the ten within Deca Sports are good – the rest, not so much. That's a 20% success rate for this compilation, so I think I'm being generous with my final score. Or maybe I just liked curling and archery that much. Yeah, I think it's the second one.